Darwinism: A Critique

Darwin’s Idea and its Ideological Context

Charles Darwin is generally credited with being one of the greatest of modern scientists. His theory of evolution, hailed by many as an elegant explanation of the origins and diversity of life, is not only taken by the scientific establishment as incontrovertible (for many decades it has been the standard fare of most biology textbooks) but it has also been enormously influential due to its profound philosophical implications. Daniel Dennett called it ‘the single best idea that anyone has ever had.’[[1]] The idea—which was also independently conceived by Darwin’s contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace—was that living organisms originated and evolved from a common biological ancestor by a mechanism of natural selection acted on by random mutations. Darwin first detailed the theory in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species.[[2]] It was a controversial idea from the outset, even among scientists, but it took hold in some quarters particularly when championed by a growing number of supporters who came to be known as ‘Darwinists’ (the term was first coined in 1860 by Darwinism’s chief polemicist, Thomas Henry Huxley, aka ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, who advocated rationalistic agnosticism as a scientific methodology and therefore had no use for any understanding of reality outside that framework), and later by the ‘Neo-Darwinists’ who have adapted his theory to genetic mutation (the most well-known of the Neo-Darwinists is the ideologue, Richard Dawkins, perhaps best known for promoting the ideas of ‘the selfish gene’ and ‘the God delusion’).

It is useful to clarify, before we examine some of the objections to the theory, that the term ‘evolution’ can mean different things, some of which are evident and not objected to. Understood simply as growth and change over time, or as the adaptation of an organism to environmental conditions, evolution is universally accepted and uncontroversial. The problem lies not with adaptive micro-evolution but with transformist macro-evolution—with the claim that, through a gradual process of random, heritable variation and natural selection (the natural processes that preserve changes beneficial to the survival of the organism, while eliminating harmful ones), one species can transform into a radically different new species—such as an ape into a man.[[3]] Because Darwin based his ideas on materialistic explanations of how life and its forms evolved mechanistically, many Darwinists have no need for the ‘God hypothesis’. And because his theory presumes no ‘a priori’ teleological justification—it naturally favors adaptive traits conducive to the preservation of the organism, a feature colloquially referred to as (in Herbert Spencer’s phrase) the ‘survival of the fittest’—it rules out intelligent design. The controversial aspects of the theory are therefore that it purports to do away with the need for any metaphysical explanation of the origin of life or consciousness, and also with scriptural understandings of creation and of the archetypal integrity of created forms, relying instead on material and mechanistic explanations alone, and that it consequentially denies any ‘special’ place for Man in the order of nature.

Any serious consideration of Darwin’s idea therefore invites not only questions about the scientific basis for the theory but also of its metaphysical presuppositions, in particular its outright rejection of supernatural causes operating in nature. As one of the pillars of materialistic philosophy, Darwinism has implications for bioethics (in issues such as eugenics or transhumanism), politics (as an argument for social engineering, colonialism or communism), psychology (because it implies there is no subject or ‘soul’ beyond the reified psyche or the brain), ethics (because it raises the issue of whether there can be any meaningful role for altruism, or anything other than ‘self-interest and raw competition’[[4]] in a ‘selfish gene’), aesthetics (because it questions whether any archetypal reality can have meaning in a purely naturalistic world) and a host of other areas including, of course, religion (because it places in doubt the existence of God and the value of religion). It is no wonder then that Darwin’s ideas have had far-reaching and major impacts on modernist thinkers ranging from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, to the contemporary New Atheists, many of whom (like the biologist Richard Dawkins and the chemist Peter Atkins) are part of the scientific establishment.

While it is not surprising that Darwin’s ideas have encountered considerable opposition within the religious establishment, it is unfortunate that some of that opposition has been propounded by rejecting both good science and sound metaphysics. This has allowed critics of religion to caricature it as irrational superstition and to depict its followers as unintelligent, credulous, and dangerous.[[5]] This has led to a misapprehension of religion—causing it to become an easy target for both wags and skeptics ranging from the likes of H. L. Mencken to Christopher Hitchens, who have pilloried it—and the approach has also undermined its significant intellectual objections to materialistic science and philosophy, including Darwinism. One finds therefore that in the public square issues are often couched in reductionistic terms that present a false opposition between science and religion, with some proponents for science typically characterizing those who believe in God or an afterlife as self-deluded and unscientific while some proponents of religion take similarly reactionary positions against science. But despite the ‘Galileo affair’ or the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’, there is no inherent opposition between science and religion, so long as these are understood integrally, as approaches to a reality which is transcendent. It is when they are reduced to a desacralizing dogmatism that faith and science come to be viewed in oppositional terms rather than as integrally connected. Insofar as modern science presumes to reduce the cosmos to its outer elements, and all knowledge to merely the quantitative and the measurable, it engages in an epistemological error which alienates the intellect from its integral foundations. While the reactions of Church and religious authorities in the cases of Galileo and Scopes may have been scientifically untenable (understood purely from the premises of modern science[[6]]) they were nonetheless rooted in an intuition about the integral and sacral nature of reality which was metaphysically sound.[[7]]

The roots of this epistemological error, which has been present in the history of human thought at various times, became most pronounced in modern Western philosophy with the Cartesian schism. By asserting the ‘cogito’ of the thinking subject discontinuously against the reified world, Descartes in effect ruptured the traditional unity between man and nature. The legacy of this schism was profound. One of the consequences was the loss of the sense of the sacred. Nature and knowledge, once desacralized, were no longer perceived through the lens of the sacred continuum of microcosm/macrocosm/metacosm or of knower/known/knowledge. The traditional understanding of knowledge as a sacred science (scientia sacra), which apprehended reality as based on the unity of being, was thereby replaced by a modern understanding in which science became the way for man—as the ‘res cogitans’, now alienated from nature, the ‘res extensa’—to understand the external world without any reference to an integrating reality. At the same time as the ‘known object’ became reified as only physical matter rather than as theophany, the ‘knowing subject’ also became reified as the individual ‘ego’ of the psyche, cut off from its transcendent intellectual center, its pneumatic core. In consequence, the objectified world (the observed) and its disjunctive subject (the observer) were both reduced to their outward dimensions of quantitative matter, lacking the qualitative and archetypal dimensions of hylomorphic matter, while science came to be understood as merely the study of the external world cut off from the transcendent dimensions of subject and object—of the parts without reference to the whole, of the physical dimension of existence cut off from the higher orders of being.

A whole complex of factors—among them, the Catholic Church’s mishandling of the Galileo case—set the stage for the opposition of science and religion, an opposition which has persisted for centuries. With the ensuing decline of spiritual literacy, the book of nature was no longer regarded as reflecting the book of God. For many natural scientists, a literal reading of the Biblical account of creation was contradicted by science, yet many now lacked the inner understanding to interpret the signs of both scripture and nature. Anyone who glanced into a telescope could be persuaded that the earth was a mere speck in the universe, and that our existence could be of little significance within the vast panorama of the cosmos. The modern sciences taught that the material world was subject to natural laws which, as Newton and others had demonstrated, could be gleaned by human ingenuity alone. Empirical observation and reasoning became the methodology of the new naturalistic sciences, cutting off knowledge from its metaphysical moorings. As scientific discoveries led to technological inventions, these began to transform human lives, and science swiftly gained in prestige. Religion, by contrast, declined in influence in Europe. In the modern West, where Christendom had undergone both the Reformation and the Enlightenment, through a combination of religious wars and the assertion of secular authority, it now faced a growing challenge from the colonization of knowledge by modern science, and by ‘quitting the field’ for several centuries after Galileo, the Church—and thereby religion—came to be increasingly viewed as unfashionable, unscientific and anachronistic. It was into this crucible that the ideas of Darwin were born.

Darwin—who was somewhat devout as a youth but had grown increasingly skeptical of religion following his voyage on the Beagle—was undoubtedly aware of the religious implications of his theory. In fact, his ideas about evolution had provoked in him a personal crisis of faith, as it would for many who followed him. Dawkins would later remark (in The Blind Watchmaker) that ‘Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist’[[8]] and Martin Lings wrote that ‘There can be little doubt that in the modern world more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution as their immediate cause than to anything else.’[[9]] This is in marked contrast with many of the earlier great modern scientists, including Galileo and Kepler—and others like the physicist, Isaac Newton, and his contemporary, the father of modern chemistry in the West, Robert Boyle, as well as the experimental scientist, Michael Faraday—who regarded science as a way to better understand God. The fact that these remarkable scientists and many others who followed them (for instance, James Clerk Maxwell, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg, or, more recently, Francis Collins, John Eccles, and Wolfgang Smith, among many others) have been openly religious, or willing to admit of the transcendent realm, raises a question about the credibility of the thesis that science is incompatible with religion or, in some interpretations, with not mere Deism but a creative God operating in nature. The issue is significant because it underscores a growing rift between the Darwinian ideology of evolutionism and science, in particular with foundational physics which is increasingly undermining materialistic assumptions about the nature of reality.

...the enigmas of physics are rooted in the metaphysical error of reducing reality to the single plane of quantitative matter, conducive to scientific methodologies of measurement and analysis, and of thereby failing to distinguish between different ontological planes, in particular between the corporeal world observed by our everyday senses, the sub-corporeal world of quantum reality and physics, and the supra-corporeal realm of the angelic and the Divine.

Physicists understand the structure of physical reality (at the sub-corporeal level of atoms and quantum reality) to be indeterminate, probabilistic and epistemologically uncertain. Based on the collapse of the wave function and of the principle of indeterminacy, physical matter is found to be elusively ambiguous, subsisting in a state of quasi-existence, midway between being and non-being, between act and potency;[[10]] and in observing it, perplexingly, the observer, through the instruments of observation, appears to be implicated through the probability function in what is being observed. Through the strange phenomena of nonlocality and ‘entanglement’ (based on Bell’s theorem), physicists have realized that quantum reality does not operate on the basis of Newtonian mechanics or even of Einsteinian relativity. According to quantum theory, unobserved particles can bilocate, existing enigmatically in superposition in two places at once—yet these laws evidently do not apply to the corporeal world of our senses. Physics, being pushed beyond the comfortable boundaries of materialistic science into the realm of metaphysics, is understanding that it cannot identify in simply materialistic terms what is real. At most, as Arthur Eddington once noted, physics can merely provide pointer readings to reality. Instead of embracing materialistic and mechanistic models of reality, some physicists—like Wolfgang Smith and Seyyed Hossein Nasr—insist upon more holistic understandings of reality where the whole is understood to be greater than merely the sum of its parts. They point out that the enigmas of physics are rooted in the metaphysical error of reducing reality to the single plane of quantitative matter,[[11]] conducive to scientific methodologies of measurement and analysis, and of thereby failing to distinguish between different ontological planes, in particular between the corporeal world observed by our everyday senses, the sub-corporeal world of quantum reality and physics, and the supra-corporeal realm of the angelic and the Divine. These planes, which constitute an integral and intrinsically harmonious reality, operate based on different laws, yet reflect a single intelligence operating within and behind it. The design of the universe hints at this intelligence. The physical forces and ‘cosmological constants’ permit life on earth to exhibit a fine-tuning[[12]] so precise as to cause some scientists to wonder whether human and earthly existence are merely a matter of chance or of deliberation, and to speculate on whether the cosmos is expressly designed to sustain human life on our planet (the ‘anthropic principle’). Fearing that this would allow God ‘a foot in the door’,[[13]] some scientists are inventing theories that are increasingly far-fetched (like that of the multiverse) and are beyond the methodologies of modern science to test or falsify, let alone prove.[[14]] Others, like Wolfgang Smith, have taken up the challenge of integrating physics and metaphysics, arguing for the transcendent origin of reality and its archetypal design, and incorporating traditional doctrines of planimetry[[15]] and vertical causation in an attempt to counter reductive understandings of reality. As with physics, mathematics too is pointing away from a purely material dimension to transcendence. Thus, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems establish that, as a matter of mathematical logic, no set can be validated purely from within. William Dembski’s mathematical studies of patterns promote the view that ‘specified complexity’ or ‘complex specified information’ (events, objects or structures that exhibit patterns with a low probability of occurrence, found, for example, in nature and in bio-organisms) are a reliable marker of intelligent design (the ‘design inference’).[[16]] Information theory is based on a fundamental premise that no output can exceed the informational input—implying that the Darwinian premise that evolutionary outputs can transcend the intrinsic inputs is flawed. These aspects of theoretical and physical science, and mathematics, all point to a valid basis for non-material or metaphysical views of reality which hardcore materialists, for ideological reasons disguised as ‘science’, are loathe to embrace because of their adverse implications—especially for Darwinism.

It is, however, within the field of biology itself, in particular microbiology and molecular genetics—sciences not in existence in Darwin’s time[[17]]—buttressed by recent findings in paleontology, that serious challenges to Darwinism are emerging. Despite hostile opposition from the scientific establishment,[[18]] a growing number of scientists have begun to dissent from the Darwinian dogma [[19]] and to mount a solid challenge to the theory of evolution. The most recent of the prominent ‘Darwin skeptics’ has been Yale professor of computer science, David Gelernter, who denounced the theory in an essay titled ‘Giving Up Darwin.’[[20]] In that essay he stated:

There’s no reason to doubt that Darwin successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances: changes to fur density or wing style or beak shape. Yet there are many reasons to doubt whether he can answer the hard questions and explain the big picture—not the fine-tuning of existing species but the emergence of new ones. The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain.

There are several objections to Darwin’s transformist theory of macro-evolution[[21]] based on both metaphysical and scientific grounds. We will first survey some of the scientific objections and then those based on metaphysical principles.

Scientific Objections to Darwinism

From the many scientific objections to Darwinism, we will consider only four: (1) There is no scientific explanation for the origin of life; (2) The irreducible complexity of bio-organisms renders it impossible, in practical terms, to randomly replicate it through evolution; (3) The DNA of bio-organisms points to intelligent design; and (4) The fossil record does not corroborate the transformist theory.

Origin of Life

While Darwin’s theory does not strictly concern itself with how life originated, its focus being how it evolved thereafter from the simplest life form, the basic cell, to the diverse life forms in existence today, it has long been recognized that what Darwin takes for granted raises significant questions about his materialistic starting point. As a naturalist, Darwin was engaged in the observation of natural patterns of behavior, but as a theorist, he speculated that those patterns developed naturally and randomly, and by materialistic causes alone. But this naturally random and materialistic process of evolution—which Dawkins says provides merely the ‘illusion of design’ and Francis Ayala has termed ‘design without a designer’—had to begin somewhere. Darwin speculated in a letter to his close friend, Joseph Hooker, in 1871 that the first organisms must have evolved out of a warm chemical pond of inorganic matter (colloquially known as the ‘primordial soup’) in which, he hypothesized, electrical currents (also assumed to be present) acted on a mixture of chemicals to form the first protein which would later evolve into life. Darwin presupposed the existence of the primordial soup. But for those who seek to sustain a materialistic theory of non-designed life and its mechanistic evolution, this presupposition is problematic. Some biologists will presumably be content to leave to cosmologists and quantum physicists—though not to metaphysicians—the explanation of the origin of matter; but, as we have noted earlier, their evidence is pointing decidedly in the direction of a non-material foundation of reality. Physicists—and, as we shall later see, biologists too—are also encountering more evidence that, at its core, reality is built on code, on a network of information whose origin and programming remain an enigma.

James Tour, a leading scientist in the field, concludes that ‘no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks [of cellular life], let alone assembly into a complex system.’

Science has never been able to establish the origins of existence, life or consciousness—nor can it do so as long as it confines its knowledge to materialistic foundations and mechanistic causes. Trying to explain the existence of matter materialistically is like trying to lift oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. From the point of view of logical reasoning, it is a tautological fallacy to presuppose matter as part of explaining its existence. To surmount this problem requires a transcendent perspective (an application of Gödel’s theorem) such as metaphysics, planimetry or vertical causation, but these non-materialistic premises are unacceptable to materialists—not on any scientific basis, but purely on ideological grounds. Even if a non-tautological explanation of the origin of the matter was possible, which clearly it is not, materialists would also need to demonstrate how inorganic matter could, acting through purely materialistic mechanisms, originate both organic life and consciousness—in metaphysical terms, an impossibility.[[22]] Yet it is precisely a claim that Darwinists boldly make. In what resembles more science-fiction than science, their theories range from panspermia (life encoded by aliens in outer space—but who created the aliens?) to abiogenesis (life emerging spontaneously from inorganic matter—but who created the inorganic matter?).

In 1953, an experiment conducted by Stanley Miller at the University of Chicago claimed to have produced various amino acids (these are needed to form proteins, the building blocks of life) by sending electrical currents through a mixture of inorganic chemicals. This Frankenstein-type experiment, based on Darwin’s speculations, was initially hailed as proof that inorganic matter could, through material processes alone, produce the elements of life. Later, it was realized by molecular biochemists that this vaunted claim was baseless. Of the 20 amino acids required to produce the protein-based structures of living cells only a few were in fact generated, and those that were lacked the molecular composition needed to shape a functional protein.[[23]] To place the current state of the science of life-origins in perspective, James Tour, a leading scientist in the field, concludes that ‘no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks [of cellular life], let alone assembly into a complex system.’[[24]] Despite the lack of any evolutionary algorithm to explain how life began, the Miller experiment and other more recent experiments which have sought to replicate it—with similar abortive results—continue to be hailed by some Darwinists as indicative of the possibility that life can in fact emerge from goop—ignoring, of course, that the origins of the goop itself would need to be explained. The fact remains that there is no consensus on evolutionary mechanisms at all, let alone one that explains how life evolved out of inanimate matter.

Irreducible Complexity

An even more daunting problem is revealed by carefully examining the feasibility of Darwinian evolution at a micro-organic level. With the advent of microbiology and genetic engineering (sciences invented after Darwin’s lifetime), it has become possible to think of evolution in terms of cellular and genetic mechanisms and behavior. The new sciences are posing new challenges for the Neo-Darwinists, including the need to explain how a process of graduated and random evolution could construct the irreducibly complex and sophisticated structures of bio-organisms (the problem of complexity); and a related issue, given the claim that such structures are randomly created and not the product of intelligent design, of how evolution addresses the encoding of the genetic information vital to life (the problem of DNA code, which Stephen C. Meyer refers to as ‘the signature in the cell’[[25]]).

Dealing with the first of these challenges, Darwin had anticipated an objection to his theory based on the argument that some complex organs might be unable to develop gradually. He addressed it in chapter six of the Origin where he conceded, ‘If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down’; going on to add, ‘But I can find out no such case.’[[26]] However, in Darwin’s lifetime, there was no true understanding of the true complexity of bio-organisms such as the cell, of the nano-technology of proteins or their relationship to DNA, nor of the microbiological sophistication and the internal bio-circuitry of living organisms. In his 1996 book, Darwin’s Black Box,[[27]] the biochemist, Michael Behe, argued that such complex internal mechanisms were taken for granted by Darwin (they were the ‘black box’ of the title). Behe contended that many biological systems were, at a microbiological level, ‘irreducibly complex’ (what Dembski has referred to as ‘complex specified information’, leading to a ‘design inference’). Each cell has the complexity of a factory or a city, and possesses the diversity and sophistication that even the most advanced human engineering or computer technology is unable to replicate. Michael Denton, also a biochemist, has likened the cell, when magnified a million times, to ‘a giant airship’ which he describes as ‘an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design.’[[28]] The myriad human cells must function with the skill and precision of a coordinated micro-biological orchestra. Within the cell itself, there are complex self-replicating manufacturing factories, information processing storage and retrieval systems, with signal transduction circuitry,[[29]] hi-tech motors, precision-targeted transportation and distribution systems, and other sophisticated and choreographed micro-systems.

Many irreducibly complex systems exist in nature and within living organisms.[[30]] Behe famously cites the example of the bacterial flagellum, a functionally integrated and efficient bi-directional bio-machine within certain bacteria (like e-coli), enabling them to swim through their aqueous environment. The flagellum comes equipped with operational elements such as a filament that acts as a propeller, a drive shaft, a motor, a stator, and other parts all built by proteins. Behe also cites examples of other irreducibly complex bio-designs such as the cilia, blood clotting mechanisms, and immune systems. Many complex bio-structures are so intricately and interdependently designed and constructed that the removal of any single component from the complex assembly can be fatal to the functioning of the whole. Such systems, in order to be viable at each stage, would have to be constructed purposively, not by random accretions, with the whole preconceived functioning design in mind. An irreducibly complex bio-organism could not evolve gradually or randomly because it would be unviable at each stage until completely assembled. As the Darwinian process of evolution excludes ‘a priori’ teleological mutations, it is difficult to conceive how it could produce an irreducibly complex biological system such as even a basic living cell. This would require a combinative and coordinated assembly of its various parts to simultaneously construct the whole. Stated in terms of the theory of natural selection, each intermediate stage of construction would need to be functional so as to fit the Darwinian model of natural selection and to avoid being eliminated as non-beneficial for survival. Behe notes, ‘the hurdles for gradualism become higher and higher as structures are more complex, more interdependent.’[[31]] As we have seen, even simple cells can possess a level of complexity which far exceeds the ability of evolutionary mechanisms to explain.

Behe’s argument essentially amounts to asserting that irreducible complexity points to intelligent design. While the argument continues to be opposed on essentially ideological grounds by the scientific establishment, it has not been refuted on the basis of science—and, perhaps, can never be. The possibility of random inputs and processes producing complex and sophisticated outputs having the ‘illusion of design’ is extremely remote, particularly in the time frames available.[[32]] An oft-cited example is that of millions of monkeys banging away on typewriters and eventually being able to produce, by chance alone, the complete works of Shakespeare. Another example, given by Fred Hoyle,[[33]] is that of a Boeing-747, lying completely dismantled in parts in a junkyard, being able to be fully reassembled by a chance whirlwind blowing through the junkyard. While one cannot definitively disprove this possibility to the satisfaction of those who choose to believe it as a matter of faith,[[34]] the burden of proof surely rests with the proponents of Darwinian evolution, not with its opponents.[[35]]

Genetics and Intelligent Design

At the level of genetics, biology functions on the basis of biochemically encoded information, i.e. design, or what Stephen C. Meyer terms ‘the signature in the cell’. The body plans for the various species and the programs for their cellular functions are all encoded in their genes. The four nucleotide bases of the DNA, using a process of genetic transcription, translation, and sequencing, combine in codons (triplets of nucleotides) to construct polypeptide chains of amino acids which then fold into proteins, the elements essential to life. As Gelernter explains in his Claremont Review essay, random genetic mutations cannot produce functional genes or viable and precise protein folds. A random modification of a functional gene will inevitably degrade it, not improve it,[[36]] while the prospect of randomly varying genes from the gene pool to construct even a modest-sized viable protein sequence of, say, 150 amino acids is so remote as to be virtually impossible. It is, says Gelernter, like constructing a necklace (being the protein) of 150 beads (being the amino acids), each randomly selected from 20 beads (being the pool of applicable available amino acids) in which only a particular sequence will be viable (capable of folding into stable functioning structures). The odds of accomplishing that, according to an experiment conducted by the biologist, Douglas Axe, are summarized by Gelernter as follows:

He [Axe] estimated that, of all 150-link amino acid sequences, 1 in 10⁷⁴ will be capable of folding into a stable protein. To say that your chances are 1 in 10⁷⁴ is no different, in practice, from saying that they are zero. It’s not surprising that your chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore play a part in evolution, are even smaller. Axe puts them at 1 in 10⁷⁷.

All this, argues Meyer,[[37]] supports intelligent design. Gene sequencing has shown that the DNA functions like a programming code translated by the RNA to select the genetic information to make polypeptide chains to form viable proteins. The proteins are programmed by the genetic code to shape the forms of each species according to plans encoded in the genes, and to build the irreducibly complex structures of their organisms. Meyer asserts that the biological mechanisms involved cannot randomly construct new species nor can they, without their genetic programs, direct the lives of organisms. On the contrary, at a micromolecular level, each organism functions in ways similar to computers, namely, based on information programming, the origin of whose source code and translation mechanisms remain a scientific mystery. However, as Meyer (who is a theistic scientist) argues, the presence of information programming is indicative of intelligent design.[[38]]

Darwinian processes have no need for qualitative and (in evolutionary terms) useless attributes such as purely ornamental beauty or the instinct of sacrificial goodness, nor for civilization, language, aesthetics, ethics, or spiritual meaning, let alone for evolving life or consciousness out of inorganic matter. Yet, not only do these attributes and qualities subsist in nature, they possess value beyond Darwinian utility.

The design hypothesis (and, for Meyer, the ‘return of the God hypothesis’[[39]]) is deemed controversial because it is anathema to evangelical evolutionists who reject, on ideological grounds, any hint of supranatural influences in the natural realm of science. But in a world without such influences, one is left only with soulless mechanisms, which denature the world and dehumanize man. Darwinian processes have no need for qualitative and (in evolutionary terms) useless attributes such as purely ornamental beauty or the instinct of sacrificial goodness,[[40]] nor for civilization, language, aesthetics, ethics, or spiritual meaning, let alone for evolving life or consciousness out of inorganic matter. Yet, not only do these attributes and qualities subsist in nature, they possess value beyond Darwinian utility. Nature contains a far richer assortment of elements than Darwin’s theory would countenance as necessary for species-preservation. To explain these, new forms of social, historical, literary and philosophical Darwinism are emerging, constructing narratives to fit Darwin’s theory. But Darwinism, as science, has not met its burden of proof (to demonstrate a viable evolutionary mechanism for its transformist claims) precisely because it is at core not a science but a dogma, a form of ideological materialism. As dogma, it is not ‘falsifiable’, rendering it impervious to disproof. Its dogmatic claims, which are simply taken on faith,[[41]] cannot be settled at the level of science but of metaphysics—which it paradoxically rejects.

The Fossil Record

A final problem we shall consider is that of the fossil record, which highlights the discontinuity between the diverse species, which appear abruptly in large groups instead of in a continuous spectrum of gradually evolving forms. Darwin himself was troubled by the lack of evidence of intermediate life forms between the evolving species. He had expressed his doubt about the ‘missing links’ in the Origin:

Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well-defined?[[42]]

It was a doubt that he expected to be resolved by future paleontological discoveries which, he believed, would affirm his theory. Not only did this not happen, but the evidence which did emerge created even greater cause for Darwin’s doubt. Fossil discoveries in the Burgess Shale (a 508 million years old rock formation in the Canadian Rockies, discovered in 1908) and the Chengjiang and Qingjiang biotas (a 518 million years old fossil trove in China, discovered in 1984 and 2019, respectively) show that most existing life forms appeared fully developed during the Cambrian period within a relatively short time. This rapid appearance of fully formed and diverse new species—without precursors in the Pre-cambrian fossil record—creates two significant problems for Darwinists. The first is the missing evidence of any ‘transitional forms’ necessary to corroborate Darwin’s theory. While some scientists have speculated that the intermediate forms may have been too delicate to be preserved,[[43]] the discoveries disclose many examples of small or soft-bodied Precambrian fossils,[[44]] highlighting that the most likely reason for the lack of evidence of missing fossils is not their inability to be preserved but simply that the putative intermediate forms never existed at all. The second problem is the rapidity of the appearance of the new life forms, challenging Darwin’s theory of gradual evolution (by ‘insensibly fine gradations’) over time. What has astounded paleontologists is the sheer speed (in terms of the evolutionary time scale) with which the fully developed and new life forms emerged; their appearance was so rapid that the event is called ‘the Cambrian explosion.’[[45]] The recent spectacular finds in China have caused scientists to revise their understanding of the appearance of early life forms: they were more diverse, more complex, and their appearance was more sudden than had been previously assumed—a period ranging between an estimated 10 to 70 million years which is considered ‘the blink of an eye’ in evolutionary terms. [[46]]

The saltation theory of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ offered by biologists like Stephen J. Gould, in which it is hypothesized that evolution alternates between periods of rapid change and periods of stasis, suggests that one would expect fewer transitional forms because of the rapid evolution. But this hypothesis has been discredited on several grounds—even by Neo-Darwinists like Dawkins. Darwin himself called for a gradual process of evolution, not a process of explosive change. If one likens the process to climbing a mountain—in Dawkins’ famous example, scaling the heights of ’Mount Improbable’—this can only be done by a slow process of approaching the summit from the gentle slope rising up from the rear of the mountain, instead of attempting to scale its sheer cliff-face from the front in the mistaken belief that this will be safer and shorter. Genetic experiments have demonstrated that rapid random mutations do not in fact improve genetic fitness but actually impair it, often killing the gene. However, Dawkins’ dilemma is that the timeframe required for the slower climb—through the myriad genetic micro-mutations needed for the organism to evolve to the putative new species—is a period of many hundreds of millions of years, a period much longer than the rapid ‘explosion’ allows. It is a pick-your-poison dilemma:

Punctuated equilibrium attempts to explain the fossil record but fails to explain what we know about genetic mutations. Traditional neo-Darwinism restricts itself to small genetic mutations and a more plodding evolutionary pace but clashes with the fossil record. Evolutionists, in essence, face a pick-your-poison dilemma.[[47]]

And beyond this, the punctuated equilibrium model itself faces a pick-your-poison dilemma. Either the proposed evolutionary bursts are too fast to be mathematically plausible, or they are too slow to explain the fossil record’s pattern of abrupt appearance and stasis, even taking into account the reality that the fossil record is highly incomplete.[[48]]

Despite this overwhelming absence of evidence for Darwinian macro-evolution, the theory cannot be definitively disproved. Absence of proof is not proof of absence—and, Darwinism, as dogma, for reasons Popper stated above, is not ‘falsifiable’. How does one effectively prove a negative (that the absence of fossils indicates that the transitional forms did not exist)? Or that the timescale was absolutely insufficient for evolution to occur (the rapid emergence of new fully-formed and diverse species indicates more a ‘revolution’ than an ‘evolution’, as one paleontologist has noted)? Because such matters may never be conducive to conclusive proof, Gelernter remarks that ‘any thoughtful person must ask himself whether scientists today are looking for evidence that bears on Darwin, or looking to explain away evidence that contradicts him’, implying that it is materialistic ideology rather than science which is influencing interpretations.

The Metaphysical Context

Before turning to the metaphysical criticisms of Darwinism, we need first to introduce certain aspects of traditional metaphysics and to contrast how its worldview differs from the ideology of modern science. Materialistic science presumes that all effects are attributable to causes located on the same (horizontal) plane. That presumption is correct only with regard to operations limited to a particular plane, but it is incorrect insofar as it ignores or reduces other planes of reality to the material plane conducive to its methodologies of perception, measurement and analysis. The preliminary issue to be considered, therefore, is whether it is epistemologically justifiable to admit of a planimetric view of reality—of ontological levels beyond the horizontal plane of matter, which materialistic science and philosophy have improperly ignored. If, as we shall argue, reality is indeed planimetric and therefore admits of verticality, it will be clear that materialistic science and the philosophy on which it is founded engage in an epistemic closure which improperly excludes the possibility of the eternal procession per descensum (‘downward from above’) and which provide explanations for the origin of existence, life and consciousness—explanations that have inevitably eluded the confined epistemology of modern science.

Epistemology

As we have noted, materialistic philosophy, which underpins materialistic science, limits knowledge to the quantifiable and measurable realm of matter and physical energy. Its vantage point, and its arbitrary starting point, is that of the Cartesian subject gazing outward at the reified world of objects. What can be known is understood to be that which is rationally ‘sensible’—accessible to one’s reason and senses and, by extension, to the instruments that aid the senses to perceive sensible objects—and which is ‘intelligible’ to rational analysis or abstraction from the sensible world. In other words, we can know only those material things that our senses can identify and our minds can induce and infer from the senses by reason. This understanding of knowledge is limited and inaccurate—limited because, to paraphrase Shakespeare, ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in materialistic philosophy’; and inaccurate because, firstly, it limits the organs of perception of the knowing ‘subject’ to Sense and Reason, and thereby excludes the Intellect, and, secondly, it limits the reality of the knowable 'object' to quantifiable matter which, while it is 'prima facie knowable', excludes the essential and qualitative transcendent reality from which objectivity, intelligibility and meaning derive, as well as the qualitative aspects of nature itself. Moreover, this limited and flawed knowledge alienates the subject from the object, Man from Nature, depriving science of its integral and ethical framework.

Contrast this materialistic understanding of knowledge with that of traditional metaphysics, summarized here in a passage from Whitall N. Perry:

The absolute Object is transcendent Being, or God; the most relative or contingent object is matter. In the same way, the absolute Subject is the immanent Self; the most relative or contingent subject is the individual ego.[[49]]

The traditional view is premised on a planimetric structure spanning the absolute Object and Subject—which are one[[50]]—to the relative and contingent object (res extensa or matter) and subject (res cogitans or individual ego) of Cartesian dualism. By reducing objectivity to simply the relative and contingent world of what René Guénon has termed ‘Quantity’, which excludes the qualitative and archetypal realms of transcendent Being, and by confining subjectivity to materialistic forms of cognition which exclude the transpersonal consciousness or ‘intellection’ of the immanent Self, materialistic philosophy and science distort reality: they reify matter and deify the individual ego. As Perry elaborates,

The corruption of the objective pole leads to materialism, and the corruption of the subjective to individualism.[[51]]

Seen from a materialistic standpoint, such metaphysical notions of supra-material or transcendent reality are not based on ‘science’ and are therefore readily dismissed by materialistic scientists as mere conjecture. But while it is true that the transcendent realities of metaphysics are beyond the limited ken of a ‘science’ which admits as real only those elements that are ‘material’, they are nevertheless intelligible realities from the hallowed perspective of the scientia sacra. The traditional sciences have always regarded reality as Absolute, and all that is relative and contingent as potentially open to transcendence—that is, capable of being perceived by the higher faculties of knowing and by ‘those who have eyes to see’.[[52]] In this understanding, knowledge of reality[[53]] is perceived as an unveiling, a revelation ‘from above’, and correspondingly knowledge as a transmission from higher to lower orders. Importantly, it is not the discursive and instrumental reason (Ratio)—the analytic faculty of modern science—which opens to knowledge ‘from above’, rather it is the receptive intellect (Intellectus). Though modern philosophy rarely distinguishes reason from intellection, these faculties of perception are distinct in traditional metaphysics and pertain to separate orders. While the Ratio dissects and analyses quantitative matter in order to know each part operationally and to determine the laws of their causes and effects on the same plane, the Intellectus perceives integrally, ‘imaginally’,[[54]] symbolically, and synthetically, in order to know qualitatively the meaning and purpose of the planimetric whole. The etymology of the term Intellectus is instructive; it comes from Latin terms intus (within) and legere (to read), denoting that intrinsic knowledge is already embedded within us, and therefore the knowledge of the higher orders is accessible to us by ‘seeking within’; hence, learning, in the classical understanding, is anamnesis or accessing what we already know intrinsically, namely, that which is inscribed within our innermost nature. In this sense, faith—so readily dismissed by the materialistic rationalist as mere credulity—is immanently grounded in our supra-rational intelligence and is not opposed to reason but transcends it by participating in a higher order of intelligence, like a lamp lit by a sustaining light.[[55]] Implicit in the epistemology of the Intellect is the existence of planimetry, of levels of reality that extend within and beyond the solidified world of matter, and knowledge is a supernal light revealed to the receptive Intellect within Man. This insight about knowledge from our own human nature is vital, as we will see, to an understanding of the materialistic limitations of Darwinism.

Planimetry and Verticality

In purporting to account for the origins of Man, it is remarkable that modern scientists fail to acknowledge the incommensurability between consciousness and intelligence, on the one hand, and the material world which is the focus of their investigations, on the other. The former elements derive from a higher ontological order and cannot be adequately accounted for by reducing them to the latter. Existence itself is, according to traditional philosophy, contingent on an ontological hierarchy which alone can properly account for the transcendent dimensions of knowledge that modern science ignores. Reality is both planimetric and hierarchical. It comprises three realms: macrocosmically, these are, in descending order (1) the spiritual/intellectual, (2) the animic/psychic, and (3) the corporeal/sensory; these in turn correspond microcosmically to three organs of perception—the Intellect, the mind, and the senses—and to a tripartite anthropology of Spirit, soul and body. These realms operate in a hierarchical relationship reflecting their order of creation: Spirit is the animating force of the soul, and the soul is the activating force of the body.[[56]] This cosmology and anthropology have a principial origin beyond relativity or contingency.

Because traditional epistemology is based on a transcendent and absolute Origin,[[57]] it distinguishes between the Absolute Center which is also the hidden Origin of existence, and the contingent realms of peripheral existence.[[58]] A key principle of traditional metaphysics is that Reality is Absolute, which implies that it is both transcendent and immanent; it is greater than the sum of its manifested parts which are in no wise commensurate with it, but are merely contingent aspects of its wholeness. From its transcendent and absolute Origin there emanate, in descending degrees of hierarchy, in an eternal procession from the subtle to the gross, multiple ontological levels of reality comprising the created order, the levels being, as it were, like concentric circles of light radiating outward to a periphery from a transcendent and luminous Center[[59]] which is Absolute and Eternal, Infinite and All-Possibility.[[60]] Each descending level contains a trace of the higher level from which it emanates, while at the same time being veiled from it, so that existence—the realm of the manifest—is seen as diaphanous; that is to say, it is metaphysically transparent to transcendence—or, in metaphysical terms, a theophany. From one point of view, each descending level is increasingly opaque, concentrically distinct and discontinuous as it ‘solidifies’ (or materializes) in relation to the preceding level; from another, it is luminous and continuous in relation to that level and the preceding levels, being radially linked to the light-radiating Source whence it emanated. One can therefore either perceive reality horizontally, through the cloud of matter on a single plane of being, or vertically, as a ‘great chain of being’, as an icon of theophany—or, restated in theological terms, either with ‘eyes of the flesh’ or with ‘the eye of the Spirit’.

Materialism denies planimetry. Its science perceives reality only on the horizontal plane—absolutizing the contingent pole of matter, of Substance and Quantity—and ignores the reality of metaphysical hierarchy—purporting to reduce the Immeasurable to the measurable, and violating the metaphysical understanding of forms and archetypes, of Essence and Quality.

Form and Matter, and Creatio ex Nihilo

The metaphysical understanding of creation—not to be confused with creationism[[61]]—is predicated on the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. It asserts that creation proceeds ab intra from the Absolute and transcendent Origin (which is the nihil[[62]] from a purely horizontal perspective), through a series of steps of planimetric descent or manifestation, a divine Self-disclosure which constitutes, in the words of Frithjof Schuon, ‘a monologue of relativity’.[[63]] It is a movement from Principle to Self-manifested Being, to metacosmic polarization, to archetypal projection, to cosmic manifestation, macrocosmically and microcosmically, celestially and terrestrially. This sequence is depicted in various revealed texts, traditional teachings, literatures and myths, as for example in the Hindu Rig-Veda, one of the oldest scriptures, which describes creation through the Hiranyagharba or Golden Egg. In these teachings, the originating Principle is the unqualified Absolute, the Self-Subsisting and transcendent metaphysical Oneness which is beyond numerical relationships and Beyond Being. It is sometimes referred to as the ‘Godhead’.[[64]] Because it is Absolute, it intrinsically contains—without in any way derogating from its metaphysical Oneness—All-Possibility. This aspect of its principial Unity is a Relatively-Absolute ontological dimension of Absolute reality, which is Being.[[65]] As the highest qualified dimension of the unqualified Absolute, Being, or the uncreated Logos, is the ‘Creator’, the ontological Source of all creation.‘Being’ contains and expresses the metacosmic polarity of Essence and Substance[[66]]—the first polarization in divinis—which is the foundation of cosmic creation. Primordial Essence[[67]] contains the Divine Intellect, the ‘Mind of God’, as it were, which is the ordering and informing principle containing within it all the archetypal possibilities, the Platonic Forms[[68]] or Ideas (logoi) which can be imprinted in the plasticity of Matter. Primordial Substance,[[69]] by contrast, constitutes the ‘matrix’ of creation, the primordial substrate (or materia prima) of existence upon which particular Forms, in limited measure, are imprinted, and into which resulting substance (or materia secunda) other Forms can be imprinted in a continuing sequence of creation, reflecting the archetypal Forms.[[70]] Essence, then, is the activating pole of Quality, standing ‘above’ existence, as it were, and in which reside the Forms,[[71]] while Substance is the receptive pole of Quantity, standing ‘below’ existence, as it were, in which the qualitative attributesof particular Forms are given substance.[[72]]

Creation materializes or condenses the subtle elements of Eternity and Infinity into space and time, each creature being thereby clothed with qualitative attributes deriving from the archetypal Font, and thus substantiated through the descending planes of spirit, soul and body.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, outlining the teachings of Philip Sherrard (whom he quotes in the passage cited below[[73]]) and of Muslim philosophers such as Ibn ‘Arabi, ‘Abd-al-Karim Jili, and Mulla Sadra, describes the process of this emanation of Creation from God in the following excerpt from his 1994 Cadbury Lectures:

God is the supreme Lover and cannot not love. He cannot but manifest Himself in Creation, which is the “inner landscape of His own Being, God making Himself visible to Himself and simultaneously making Himself visible to us.” This Creation from within the Divine possesses in fact three stages and is not in a “single stroke”. First, God reveals Himself to Himself making Himself conscious of the latent possibilities of His own Being. Second, this formless content of Divine Intelligence or Divine Logos is differentiated in individual forms but still in an immaterial state. These are the created spiritual energies, Divine Ideas, or lógoi of classical Christian writers. …They are the Image-Archetypes that are the intermediaries between the world of pure formless and intelligible realities and the visible world. Third, there is the manifestation of these Image-Archetypes in the concrete beings of this world. Every existent is therefore the visible form of a Divine Name. “Each created being is also a concretization of divine Being and is embraced by this Being.”[[74]]

The efficient cause of creation is not—and cannot of course be—a privative aspect of the Absolute; rather, creativity expresses an aspect of the Divine Nature, which, as traditional doctrines teach, is Goodness or Love. The Divine Will, which is also an aspect of the Divine Nature, necessitates creation[[75]] as the expression of God’s Love. The cosmos emanates by Divine Fiat[[76]]—an expression of the Divine Will, resonating the Divine Nature of love[[77]]—and proceeds from the metacosmic reality of the Divine Intellect and the archetypes in a descending sequence of solidification[[78]] through ‘envelopes’ or sheaths of reality which in Vedantic terminology are called koshas.[[79]] This process of manifesting the archetypes begins[[80]] with the creation of the macrocosm—of the Heavens and the Earth, the celestial and terrestrial abodes of Man—and ends[[81]] with the creation of microcosm—of Man who is both the mirror of the cosmos and—as Imago Dei—the bridge between Earth and Heaven. All that is created is therefore first conceived in divinis as an archetype, and is later projected into nature[[82]] by a process of solidification—the‘incarnation’ of the Forms or Ideas in Substance, the in-forming of the essences in Matter.

It is important here to note that each particular created species (the term ‘species’ in the classical tradition means ‘Form’[[83]]) can only—allowing for minor variations, adaptive changes, mutations or anomalies[[84]] which do not alter the integrity of the species—correspond to but not exceed its archetype.[[85]] Creation materializes or condenses the subtle elements of Eternity and Infinity into space and time, each creature being thereby clothed with qualitative attributes deriving from the archetypal Font, and thus substantiated through the descending planes of spirit, soul and body. In this process, each creature, both macrocosmically and microcosmically, becomes a substantiated corporeal form in accordance with the Divine Will, in a continuing procession that emanates from the Transcendent Origin through the higher to the lower realms, forming the ‘great chain of being’, the hierarchic panoply of creation which manifests the theophany. For each creature, this process involves a ‘double birth’:[[86]] celestially through the archetypal birth of its seminal essence in divinis, and terrestrially through its corporeal reflection and incarnation in Matter. This can be illustrated with regard to the creation of Man through the following description by Nasr:

The genesis of man, according to all traditions, occurred in many stages: first, in the Divinity Itself so that there is an uncreated “aspect” to man. That is why man can experience annihilation in God and subsistence in Him (the al-fanū’ and al-baqā’ of Sufism) and achieve supreme union. Then man is born in the Logos which is in fact the prototype of man and another face of that same reality which the Muslims call the Universal Man and which each tradition identifies with its founder. Next, man is created on the cosmic level and what the Bible refers to as the celestial paradise, where he is dressed with a luminous body in conformity with the paradisal state. He then descends to the level of the terrestrial paradise and is given yet another body of an ethereal and incorruptible nature. Finally, he is born into the physical world with a body which perishes but which has its principle in the subtle and luminous bodies belonging to the earlier stages of the elaboration of man and his genesis before his appearance on earth.[[87]]

It is important to keep in mind that what is described here is not a horizontal chronological ascent envisaged by Darwinists but an ontological vertical descent from Essence to Matter through archetypes and the bestowal of existence. The significance of archetypal causation is crucial to distinguishing the views of both Darwinists and creationists from the metaphysical understanding, for, as Wolfgang Smith states,

What both the Darwinians and most creationists have failed to grasp is that the corporeal universe in its entirety constitutes no more than the outer shell of the integral cosmos, and that the mystery of origins needs to be resolved, not at the periphery, but precisely at the center of the cosmic circle.[[88]]

Metaphysical Objections to Darwinism

From a metaphysical perspective, the core error of Darwinism—of which its denial of archetypal causation is a symptom[[89]]—lies in its reductionism, that is, its denial of the transcendent dimension and of the higher orders of reality, and therefore of non-material causes of elements which manifest in the lower orders. In the words of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘the whole modern evolutionary theory is a desperate attempt to substitute a set of horizontal, material causes in a unidimensional world to explain effects whose causes belong to other levels of reality, to the vertical dimensions of existence.’[[90]] As with all materialistic philosophies and sciences, the reductionist bias falsely assumes that all causes derive from the horizontal plane and that all effects are therefore explicable based solely on ‘natural’ laws without recourse to metaphysical ideas (or immutable archetypes) or any conception of verticality.[[91]] It ignores that there is an integral connection between the denial of verticality and the loss of meaning, and it is not surprising therefore that one of the consequences of Darwinism is the disintegration of what it means to be ‘human’ and of our understanding of the human métier. We will therefore examine the metaphysical objections to Darwinism under two headings: (1) The loss of verticality, and (2) The loss of meaning.